Ask HN: What natural languages do you learn? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> I read Latin and Greek, want to know more French, and am intrigued by Sanskrit and Japanese.

I wanted to read more Latin and have more fun reading, and I decided that looking words up in a dictionary was an easy step to circumvent, so I made a website nodictionaries.com --- if you read Latin, check out <http://nodictionaries.com/vergil/aeneid-1/1-7> if you want to read twice as fast.

<comment><USER3> I really like the website! Would it be possible to add more languages and allow users to enter text - stem it and add the dictionary entries automatically?

<comment><USER2> nodictionaries.com/novifex

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Chinese (various Sinitic languages, but especially Modern Standard Chinese), German, Japanese, Russian, the original languages of the Bible, samplings of Latin and of various Romance languages, interesting conlangs, and others.

Here's a link to language-learning advice:

<http://learninfreedom.org/languagebooks.html>

Here's one of my favorite links about one conlang:

<http://www.xibalba.demon.co.uk/jbr/ranto/>

<comment><USER5> Chinese too. I've found Mnemosyne (a flash card app) quite useful, for learning lots of characters, though I already knew a lot about radicals, and how to combine them.

My personal project (not working yet) is a language learning web app. I think there's actually a couple of more advanced language web apps by HNers too.

<comment><USER6> Check out Remembering the Hanzi by Heisig

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I speak English fluently. At one point I spoke Latin fluently, but that has tapered off due to lack of practice (I still read very well). I speak conversational German, and just a smidge of Italian.

One of these days my wife is going to pester me to learn Japanese because she studies early Japanese culture and wants to share.

<comment><USER8> " _One of these days my wife is going to pester me to learn Japanese_ "

You should do it, for the beauty and expressiveness of the writing system alone.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Mother tongue is English. Been studying Japanese for 15 years and living in Japan for 13. Was doing Esperanto for a few years, but since I've had kids I had to ditch at least one of my hobbies. Been recently trying to pick up French, because I'm Canadian and always got good marks in French in school, and I regret ditching it after I finished grade 9 (the last year it was mandatory).

Over the years, I've taken stabs at German, Latin, Chinese, Spanish and Lojban. Same story each time---a few weeks of initial enthusiasm, and then I got bored and never returned to Language X. I don't know what kept me glued to Japanese. With Esperanto, I was about to move on when I discovered there were actually people in my town who spoke it and met every week. It added unexpected depth to what I had been approaching as a novelty language.

</comment><comment><USER10> I'm spanisch native speaker. Began learning german at age of 5 for 17 years, english at 12 for 8 years, french at 15 for 3 years (barely remember something).

Sadly my written englisch is not as good as it should (altough I have no problem reading it or with conversational englisch. My father doesnt speak englisch, so when technicians from the US came to repair his machines (CNC) I was the translator).

And with german I dont have any problems, I try to read books and watch movies so I dont forget much. And of course german ebm/dark music =)

Being in a german school (Abitur) and living 2 years in Germany helped me a lot in my career =)

<comment><USER11> FYI, it's spelled Spanish/English :)

<comment><USER10> Oh sorry, sometimes I mixed languages. In German it's with sch. Sorry =)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Very little conversational German, Swedish and took Latin/Spanish growing up.

Hur är läget? Alles klar? Todos bien?

Quite frankly the only languages you really need in the western world (aside from English) are French and Spanish (and possibly Portugese). Germans and Scandinavians mostly speak perfect English and for the most part don't tolerate my broken attempt at their language. (although they very much appreciate it)

French and Spanish are probably the most valuable because they tend to be less inclined to master English and both have very large native speaker bases. Other useful languages would be Mandarin, Russian and Arabic.

</comment><comment><USER13> English and Japanese. I also studied Latin for quite a long time, which means I have a decent stepping stone for all of the Romance languages and can read many of them with a bit of thinking. I've also studied a bit of Mandarin. I also learned American Sign Language for a bit and am learning some Japanese Sign Language now as well.

I'd like to study Arabic and Welsh sometime.

I generally study languages based on how much I'd like to learn that language and how different it is from English. I have a lot of friends that study based on business (Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin being the big ones), but that doesn't really appeal to me.

</comment><comment><USER14> I am native German and learned English and Latin in school. I value both languages very highly. I started with Esperanto, but got bored fast and left it again. Later in school I added Russian, which I really liked, but have forgotten by now, because I never get to pratice. I picked up Finnish at university, which really is a beautiful language and I can only recommend (not much use, but nice to learn^^). At the moment I am learning Swedish as I will move to Sweden in a few months. On my still-to-learn-list reside Arabic on top, closely followed by Japanese. I just love learning a few more scripts.

</comment><comment><USER15> Dutch.

I moved to Holland from California several years ago, and have picked up the language after taking a few courses. You don't need it here, but it sure helps you break out of the expat scene.

This is the first language I've really 'learned' to a good conversational level, and I am really fascinated by the process. I didn't get far with Spanish in high school, but since the process of Dutch has been so wonderful I plan on revisiting it soon, possibly other languages as well.

</comment><comment><USER16> As a non-native speaker (Norwegian), I give a lot of attention to my written English skills. I learnt some German in school, but haven't maintained what I learnt.

I learnt the Korean alphabet through Wikibooks when I wanted to try out input methods. The writing system seems to be easier to learn than other CJK languages, and I might learn more of the language as the Nation of Samsung seems pretty interesting.

</comment><comment><USER17> I would like to learn French and Chinese. Being Vietnamese and trying to understand more about Vietnam's history, I know that there are a lot of ancient tomes written in French and Chinese (Vietnam had 1000+ years of Chinese occupation and about 200 years of French). My hope is to some day read those original tomes in their full context and meaning rather than translated ones.

</comment><comment><USER18> I learned Spanish in high school, and while I can still read it ok spoken Spanish is usually to fast for me to follow.

I can also speak basic Japanese (started learning in college and continued on my own), but while I learned the syllabaries I only know a very few characters, so I can't write it.

Between the two, that's one whole language at a basic level.

</comment><comment><USER19> My native is Ukrainian, fluent in Russian. Converstional Polish and Slovakian. Just passed exam in Danish, wanna start German and Dutch. Some time ago I tried to learn Japanese, but it was quite difficult without any plactical application... Finnish would be intereting, as it's one of 3 non-indoeuropean languages in Europe;)

</comment><comment><USER20> I speak Dutch and English fluently (minus the odd expression) and am able to read Flaubert's French and Nietzsche's German. I remember only part of the Greek I picked up reading Homer. I'd like to learn Italian and Chinese, and I'm pretty sure I'll get around to it.

</comment><comment><USER21> I took 4 years of Spanish in high school, and during my fourth year I also took a year of Arabic. It was very interesting going directly from one to the other, as well as seeing the similarities (and the many differences) between the two.

</comment><comment><USER22> Japanese and Esperanto.

I took Spanish in highschool, but haven't been using it, so it's pretty much lost. I can understand little bits.

I would love to learn a lot of other languages including German, French and Irish Gaelic.

</comment><comment><USER23> German - I'm moving to Berlin in a few weeks and want to cram as much language learning into that time as possible.

Can any of you talented polyglots recommend techniques for learning lots of vocabulary quickly?

<comment> barry-cotter The quickest dirty hack is using Anki or another spaced repitition sytem program. If you download Anki you can get at the shared decks and there rea some very nice ones for German vocabulary.

For speaking/understanding speech I've heard great things about Pimsleur. Once you have the rudiments of the language listen to podcasts all the time.

Learn the grammar. You are unlikely to pick up more than the utter basics by osmosis. Good luck!

<comment><USER23> Excellent, thanks for the recommendations!

<comment> barry-cotter You're welcome. The Volkshochschule have ridiculously cheap evening classes for all levels of German ability. In the unlikely event that you're at a loose end for weeks at a time the Integrationskurse are ~free. Google 'em for more info.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I used to study Spanish but have become quite rusty at it due to lack of use over the last 10 years. Quite interested in picking up either German or Russian (I like both, I just haven't settled on one yet).

<comment><USER25> As a native Russian speaker, may I advise German. Russian has all the grammatical complexity of German + non-Roman phonetics + Cyrillic alphabet + word order that's not prescribed, but has stylistic meaning.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I am currently learning Spanish and can speak Danish, Bosnian, English and German (conversational). Would be interested in tips/articles/tools on how to learn Spanish fast (or any language for that matter).

</comment><comment><USER27> I'm fluent in English, learning Esperanto (mother tongue: spanish). Took 3 years of Portuguese at high school. I'm learning sign language too (i'm not deaf), does that count as a natural language?

</comment><comment><USER28> As a German, I'm learning English (passively through reading and writing on the internet). I pondered relearning Russian (parents are from Russia) but I decided it would be a waste of time.

</comment><comment><USER29> Spanish, mostly because my wife is from Argentina. Also, some Italian I learned from an ex-girlfriend.

I took four years of Japanese in high school and one at university.

</comment><comment><USER30> I speak Dutch (actually Flemish; my mother tongue), English and French. I've had Latin in school but that's long forgotten. Learning Spanish since recently.

</comment><comment><USER31> i speak somewhat Mandarin, i understand some Shanghai (Wei dialect) Chinese, took latin in school, and Japanese in university. I understand smidgeons of romance languages, particularly French.

<comment><USER32> I believe it's called Wu dialect.

Native Chinese here, been living near Shanghai for 6 years, but never really understand the dialect.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> French, then Latin, some German, some Greek, some Italian

</comment><comment><USER34> Esperanto and French.

</comment><comment><USER35> I know Tamil, Sanskrit, English(a mix of US,UK and Ind), Hindi, French(a bit)</comment>


WTF is Rippln? - <AUTHOR> http://www.startmyripple.com/ I'm getting a lot of BS being shared by my closest friends on some cool new way to share content. I want to know if any of you guys have been receiving the same nonsense? <comment><USER2> A clever coming soon page.

<comment><USER3> I read the copy several times and watched the video and I still have no idea what it actually is or does... besides blow smoke and generally claim to be revolutionary ...

<comment><AUTHOR> I have no clue either, it seems like a pyramid scheme of some sort to get everyone's email address

<comment><USER3> My cynicism meter pegged when they suggested 'people were saying' it was more revolutionary than email. Nobody other than the guy who did the voiceover for the video surely has ever said that. And he was paid to.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


An Internal Document Reveals How Terrified Apple Is Of Android - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.in/An-Internal-Document-Reveals-How-Terrified-Apple-Is-Of-Android/articleshow/33253274.cms

<comment><USER2> I'm not sure if this internal document really singled out Android specifically. They mention 'competitors', and that includes Windows Phone and possibly Ubuntu and Firefox.

Apple should definitely be watching out for Windows. I wasn't that excited by the release of Android KitKat or even iOS 7, even with the new flat design, which I quite like. But I'm very keen to get my hands on WP 8.1. I admit though, I've always enjoyed my WP devices more than my iOS or Androids.

<comment><USER3> Neither Apple nor Google need to worry about Windows Phone, Blackberry, Tizen, Firefox OS, or Ubuntu Touch.

As a last act, Ballmer saddled Microsoft with Nokia's handset business. This includes factories that make Series 30 phones, the Asha phones, and a new product line that uses Android backed by a Nokia-created ecosystem, in addition to Windows Phone devices that, so far, have stagnant market share. That's a big mess that has, for now, snagged the deal on India and China regulatory issues.

Tizen is the bastard child of squabbling parents. Mozilla could not recruit a mobile industry veteran to lead them. Ubuntu is delayed, Blackberry is falling below the revenue level where they can support using a proprietary OS, no matter how good that OS might be.

That leaves Jolla. Let's see if the Europeans want to adopt Nokia's alternate reality, and if the Chinese like it, too. But that's not going to matter for a couple years, if things go optimally well for Jolla.</comment></comment>


Devs deserve the benefits of a union, says US presidential hopeful Bernie - <AUTHOR> https://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/344987/Devs_deserve_the_benefits_of_a_union_says_US_presidential_hopeful_Bernie_Sanders.php <comment><USER2> I'm skeptical of any union situation based on my personal experience.

A union with a light touch on some topics and such would be fine by me. But my experience is that unions become their own bureaucracy and even well meaning people working for them will negotiate more and more and more that on the surface seem nice, but, often have unintended consequences, and a surprising inability for a union to do anything about things that aren't specificity negotiated.

Things like focus on seniority can create all sorts of unintended consequences with stuck in the mud senior folks who are highly protected, get their pick of career paths before anyone else even if ill suited for them, and new folks with new skills devalued / first to get cut when things get bad. And that's just one unintended consequence.</comment>


Angry Bird And Dreamy Smurf Are Watching You - <AUTHOR> http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/closeread/2014/01/angry-bird-and-dreamy-smurf-are-watching-you-surveillance-apps.html

<comment><USER2> Can't wait for all the bio-apps / Apple Watches add-ons for iPhone/Android to help tell the NSA how our body's are doing.

<comment><USER3> Why focus on the NSA or the intelligence services.

The fact is that many private companies have this vast amount of data, the big push with mobile device advertising was the accuracy of the geo-location. The fact you can offer really well targeted adverts.

These companies build profiles on everyone, but unlike the intelligence services who have a mandate which as some level is for our own personal good, these companies have no such thing.

The concern is that we are embracing devices that provide little, no, or obfuscated control over personal privacy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> "privacy protections for U.S. persons exist across the entire process"

Gee, thanks for letting me know that at least some people might get some degree of protection. I might be a paying customer, sponsoring USA's economy as much as any citizen, but as I'm not actually American I guess this means f __k me, right?

<comment><USER5> Right. But it's not personal; it's just that you're a possible terrorist. So is everyone you know. And if you know any US citizens, then they are possible terrorists. And so is everyone they know.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> If the juice of the article is in the Guardian why is the New Yorker linked here and not the article from the Guardian? [http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jan/27/nsa-gchq- smartp...](http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jan/27/nsa-gchq-smartphone- app-angry-birds-personal-data)</comment>


A brief history of AI - <AUTHOR> https://keplerlounge.com/2017/02/08/a-brief-history-of-ai/ <comment><AUTHOR> tl;dr:

The main point I'm trying to drive home is semantic in nature. There is no hard and fast rule that AI has to be digital or that it must be programmed via a laptop. The key thing is that there are universal design principles for building substrate-independent AI systems.</comment>


Ask HN: Favorite domain availability checker? - saiko-chriskun

So my favorite domain name checker is down: www.domai.nr<p>The top google results for others were actually pretty crappy. Works fine for the really common tlds but that's about it. What does everyone else use? <comment><AUTHOR> I use the whois command utility which is available by default on any Mac. If you're using Linux it is usually installed by default, but not always.

To install it on Ubuntu:

apt-get install whois

or on CentOS:

yum -y install jwhois

On Windows you can download it from here: [http://technet.microsoft.com/en- us/sysinternals/bb897435.asp...](http://technet.microsoft.com/en- us/sysinternals/bb897435.aspx)

To use it, simply type on the command prompt:

whois domainname.com

I find this approach much faster and easier than using a website that essentially does the same thing. Not to mention that there were rumours a few years ago that some of those websites are capturing what you're searching for and register the most interesting domain names hoping they will sell them back to you.

I hope this helps.

Cheers,

Liviu</comment>


Idle Minds and What They May Say About Intelligence - <AUTHOR> http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=idle-minds-intelligence&print=true

<comment><USER2> How many times do we have to learn this? While "at rest" is a meaningful thing for a biological system to be in, it pretty much never equates to "no activity/changes", if ever. Everything in your body is always up to something; you can't press pause on chemistry. If nothing appears to be happening, that just means that the processes that do X and the processes that do opposite- of-X are currently in balance or homeostasis, not that they are not happening at all.

Another example: Many people have the mental model of fat cells as mostly sitting there doing nothing, grabbing energy when in excess and only letting out energy when needed. Radio-tagged water studies have shown that in fact they are _always_ taking in energy and _always_ releasing energy (I'm glossing over the exact forms of "energy" since they don't matter to my point here), and what changes is not whether they are sitting there idle, but the difference in intake vs. outflow rates. They are not passive bags, but things constantly in motion.

It still boggles my mind how many stories we get coming out like this, amazed that yet another process is never really "stopped". The amazing thing is when processes really do stop. (I can think of a few cases where this might happen, like when those anti-freeze blood frogs freeze, but I wouldn't care to bet that there isn't still some processes going on anyhow...)

<comment><AUTHOR> Those are good points.. the important thing here though is, that "nothing stops" has been well established, however not only is there activity but a different kind of activity compared to the situation when mind is not at "REST"

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I see some parallels with insight as described in David Rock's talk at Google: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XeJSXfXep4M>

</comment><comment><USER4> I wonder if these long distance connections in the brain can be formed through a specific studying technique? For example drawing analogies between seemingly unrelated subjects.

<comment><USER5> Yes, it's called day dreaming :-)

This corroborates the theory that long periods of doing nothing help to develop creativity. (Day dreaming makes you smarter; meditation makes you well.)</comment></comment>


Some Mind Hacks | Ask YC-HN: What are yours? - <AUTHOR> http://oedb.org/library/college-basics/hacking-knowledge

<comment><USER2> If you love what you're learning, you'll learn better. Then it can take on a spiritual quality.

</comment><comment><USER3> \- Investigate, analyze and verify.

\- Be skeptical.

\- Wear sunscreen.</comment>


Adobe & HTML - <AUTHOR> http://html.adobe.com/

<comment><USER2> If you're not a designer, it might be hard to see, but the importance of this work is impossible to overstate. In 10 years, we'll look back on today and think about how barbaric and stupid it was that we didn't have re-flowable text in multi-box CSS layouts or absolute control of typefaces on the web.

I have come upon the edge of what CSS is capable of multiple times, especially when building <http://dustincurtis.com>, and what happened surprised me: after a while, I noticed that I had started to subconsciously alter my designs to fit within the limitations of the display technology. As I realized that the only sane way to build the layouts was to absolutely/manually position every paragraph, I slowly stopped writing and designing the articles. It was just too much work because the tools to do great custom layouts on the web just don't exist.

Compared to what should be possible by now, CSS is pretty primitive. It's a limiting factor in the digitization of traditional media, like magazines. What Adobe is doing here is awesome, and I commend them for pushing forward the status quo.

<comment><USER3> > the only sane way to build the layouts was to absolutely/manually position > every paragraph

To me, this looks like the most INsane way to build a layout. What is wrong with a "let browsers and users choose their font size, their text widht, etc."?

For instance, both my wife and I are Kindle users, we have different font size, the text reflows almost always correctly, and who prefers bigger font has bigger font. My father is also a Kindle user and use an even bigger font because of his age. Soon he will have to read book on this device, because all fixed-font books will be too small for him.

<comment><USER4> There are two big "design movements" on the web, and dustin represents one end of the spectrum. His side argues that great design makes things better, and that we all should put more time into design.

The other side says "design is not needed", and that each user can manage their design settings themselves. These are the people that pushed for RSS and Responsive design, and that see design as more of an optional addon.

None of the sides are always correct.

<comment><USER5> This is a terrible representation of the issue.

In the end, designing for the web is designing for a lack of control. I can't control your screen geometry, display technology, browser compliance, fonts, and more. There is no fixed canvas like I had in print.

This isn't a limitation, this is simply the medium. Designing for this medium means that you must take your canonical ideal and figure out how it would be transformed under different stresses: tiny screens with partial user attention, big screens viewed from couch distance, monochrome screens which don't refresh quickly, modern browsers with fast javascript, and old broken browsers.

Great design does make things better, but it isn't about pushing the design decisions onto the user. There's no argument that Dustin produces beautiful works of art, but designing with manual layout of the kind he describes is designing against the grain of the medium. CSS has limitations, but so does print. Design is what you accomplish within those limitations, and how you go about accomplishing it in a timeframe that allows you to complete your project and make a living.

<comment><USER6> I read this, thought "gee, this guy gets it", then clicked on your profile and saw "developer/designer hybrid unicorn".

From my experience, it's mainly such hybrids that have this perspective on designing for the web. It makes it hard to work with people who don't see it the same way - either designers like Dustin or developers who don't fully appreciate the value of design.

<comment><USER7> Wait, are you arguing that the "developer/designer hybrid unicorn" isn't a worthwhile pursuit? I think it's these people who are the ones pushing things forward by experimenting with their designs and trying to think of new ways to approach designing for the web.

<comment><USER6> No, I was arguing in favour of them. I'm one myself. :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This may be off-topic, but progress with CSS (flowable text, etc.) is not only glacially slow, but we're still stuck with the terribly-designed CSS standard.

I find myself wishing for some kind of "layout bytecode" -- basically, machine-readable instructions which would size every element in a browser's page using custom layout algorithms that would depend on the size of the page and the size of font glyphs.

CSS would be compiled into this bytecode, but we'd be open to inventing new and better style languages which could be compiled as well. So we could create layout languages based on columns instead of floats, for example.

If this were actually implemented in newer browsers, it could actually be emulated in older browsers using JS libraries (although it would be much slower).

Note that this really only has to do with the _layout_ properties of CSS. Things like color, rounded corners, drop shadows -- all that would still be implemented traditionally, but these aren't generally what people have problems with. It's the terrible layout algorithms of CSS which generate endless headaches.

</comment><comment><USER9> Anyone else noticed that this move comes a week shy of the two-year anniversary of Steve Jobs's infamous open letter? (<http://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/>)

"New open standards created in the mobile era, such as HTML5, will win on mobile devices (and PCs too). Perhaps Adobe should focus more on creating great HTML5 tools for the future, and less on criticizing Apple for leaving the past behind."

Write-up here: [http://webdev360.com/adobe-lays-cards-on-table-with- standard...](http://webdev360.com/adobe-lays-cards-on-table-with-standards- focused-portal-42104.html)

<comment><USER10> Let's leave the Steve Jobs PR bullshit out of this. When it comes to Web Standards, Adobe was on the bandwagon before Apple even knew such a thing existed. For example, before any browser had support for SVG, Adobe Illustrator could export SVGs, and Adobe wrote and distributed for free a plugin that made SVG available in all the major browsers (IE, Mozilla, Opera and Safari). After it acquired Macromedia, Adobe finished and made open source the first VM with a JIT for ECMA script and donated it to Mozilla, it also licensed Opera's HTML/CSS rendering engine (by far the most standards compliant at the time, KHTML/WebKit was not around) and put it into Dreamweaver. Most of Adobe's products use JavaScript as the default scripting engine since a long long time ago (close to a decade by now), and it goes on, and on. Yet in the Steve Jobs distortion field, it's actually good ol' Apple who are twisting Adobe's hand to join the Web Standards movement. Hilarious, especially since it's the same Apple who had for years an obsolete, nonconforming, slow browser that was dead last in performance and implementation of Web Standards, so much so that Zeldman, in his "Designing with Web Standards" recommends IE 5 for Mac over Safari. Imagine that, for years (until Apple forked KHTML and KJS from KDE), the best browser running on Macs was made by Microsoft.

<comment><USER11> I don't seen the point of the venom in your reply.

In fact, the Jobs letter that the grandfather comment mentions, recognized Adobe's historical contributions to publishing and graphics.

Here are its first sentences:

"Apple has a long relationship with Adobe. In fact, we met Adobe's founders when they were in their proverbial garage. Apple was their first big customer, adopting their Postscript language for our new Laserwriter printer. Apple invested in Adobe and owned around 20% of the company for many years. The two companies worked closely together to pioneer desktop publishing and there were many good times."

You may disagree with Jobs' conclusions, or dislike Apple for various reasons, but the letter shows considerable insight.

<comment><USER10> The entire letter is typical of the Jobs rhetoric, a web of lies, omissions and half-truths and I fail to notice any insight at all. Sure, in the opening paragraph, Jobs tries to pretend he doesn't loathe Adobe [1], but in the rest of it it makes sure to push the idea that Apple is some sort of white knight of open standards fighting the good fight against the visionless Adobe who still doesn't get this thing called Web Standards. For example he writes

"HTML5 is completely open and controlled by a standards committee, of which Apple is a member."

Notice it doesn't even mention that Adobe is also a member of the standards committee just like Apple? Or how about this gem:

"Apple even creates open standards for the web. For example, Apple began with a small open source project and created WebKit [bla bla bla] Apple has set the standard for mobile web browsers."

You may not know it, but KHTML was pretty competitive, shipping with Konqueror, the default web browser in KDE, and it also had a lot of users including Nokia before Apple forked it and started to add their own code to it, a lot of the times Mac specific and non portable. It also fails to mention that Apple's own contribution to WebKit is far lower than that of KDE's developers, authors of the original codebase and later additions to WebCore like KSVG2, KCanvas, KDOM [2], or Google, the current largest contributor. It's pretty deceiving to claim that Apple just took a "small open source project" and gave WebKit to Google, Nokia, Adobe (they use and contribute to WebKit also) etc to use, and it's extremely deceiving considering the bad blood between KDE developers and Apple caused by the way Apple forked KHTML and managed their fork originally ([3] for an episode of that open source drama).

Anyway, this letter is just an episode in a long and entertaining grudge match between Jobs and Adobe, dating back to the days when Apple's own survival in the holy war against PC\Microsoft depended on Adobe's commitment to support MacOS, which was apparently not enthusiastic enough by Jobs' standards.

[1] Via a review for the recently released Final Cut Pro X, I found this old article about the origins of Final Cut, where Jobs claims

"But a 1998 meeting in which Jobs asked Adobe Systems executives to develop a Mac version of their consumer video-editing program changed his mind. "They said flat-out no," Jobs recalls. "We were shocked, because they had been a big supporter in the early days of the Mac. But we said, 'Okay, if nobody wants to help us, we're just going to have to do this ourselves.' "

[http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2005/...](http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2005/02/21/8251769/index.htm)

Poor little Apple left to dry by the evil Adobe. Just look at the Wikipedia entry for Adobe Premiere to find out that outside the Jobs distortion field the software was released on Macs from day 1, in fact it was exclusive to Mac for the first versions. By version 3, a less advanced port to Windows is released, and the Mac version continues to be far ahead until... (surprise) 1998 when Mac and Windows versions reach parity and begin being released at the same time. It sure looks like Apple is trying to punish Adobe for giving the Windows peons access to software that was exclusive to Macs until then.

[2] [http://tech.slashdot.org/story/05/07/10/199244/apple-to- adop...](http://tech.slashdot.org/story/05/07/10/199244/apple-to-adopt- kde4s-kdom-and-ksvg2)

[3] <http://blogs.kde.org/node/1049>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm very cross with Adobe for forcing me to install Adobe Reader today. Makes it hard for me to have any interest in their new ideas.

[https://plus.google.com/108917965951523281393/posts/MJqS8pF7...](https://plus.google.com/108917965951523281393/posts/MJqS8pF71kH)

<comment><USER13> Reply to the sender that this is not acceptable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> On the Tools and Services page, this piqued my interest:

> Code

> We think there's a need for a different type of code editor – we're working > on something and will have more to share soon.

<comment><USER15> Same, but I've never used an adobe product thats fast, responsive, and made for power users. I don't want another editor that's trying to hold my hand like dreamweaver.

<comment><USER16> Not originally Adobe, but Homesite?

Bit embarrassing, but I actually still use Allaire's Cold Fusion Studio from 1999. I think that was, at the time, the big brother to Homesite.

<comment><USER17> Homesite was the first thing I thought of, which was definitely one of those trips down memory lane that leaves you thinking "wow, that was how long ago?!"

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Sad how the samples don't have any working fallback but break hideously on Chrome 19.

<comment><USER19> They're working fine for me in Chrome 18 and Webkit nightly, though not in Safari 5.1.5.

<comment><USER18> Yes, but are you using the experimental --enable-css-regions switch?

<comment><USER20> If it's experimental, I don't think either Adobe or Google can be blamed for the fact they don't work. Naturally the css doesn't degrade – the browser is advertising support for a feature that's currently _broken_ in the browser and thus _disabled by default_.

<comment><USER18> I was asking if the parent was using the experimental feature and wondering if it worked for him because of it. I am not using the experimental feature.

Of course samples are only samples, but they would be better if they showed a real life scenario where you have to make it work for the current generation of browsers and the upcoming generation. You don't have to degrade it with CSS, just make it work somehow.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> They lost on flash. Will they lose on html and CSS?

<comment><USER22> They did not "lose" on Flash. 99% market penetration[0] is not losing. I doubt they'll "lose" on HTML and CSS any more than they lost on Dreamweaver, they'll simply pull an Autodesk[1] and target the education and training market. It's hard to beat the Flash IDE for ease-of-use, and I imagine their new HTML-based product(s) will be the same.

[0]: [https://www.adobe.com/products/flashplatformruntimes/statist...](https://www.adobe.com/products/flashplatformruntimes/statistics.html) [1]: <http://students.autodesk.com/?nd=download_center>

<comment><USER23> > 99% market penetration

By that metric, Java has 73%, but I basically never encounter a Java applet on the web (except when digitally signing my taxes) and increasingly hardly any Flash.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I hope this will be relevant for Adobe's Digital Magazine Distribution Suite - I'm really tired of waiting for new New Yorker issues to download on my ancient 1 MBit connection (rural area in germany). There's no need to provide text as a bunch of huge images resulting in several 100 MBytes in size.

</comment><comment><USER25> Doesn't this work on Firefox? It has Canary, IE10 developer preview, Chrome and Webkit builds... no Mozilla!

<comment><USER26> Gecko seems to be behind on a lot of things lately... it took until FF11 for them to support the loop attribute on audio tags(!)

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Wow! At first I thought Adobe had jumped into the browser market. That would be interesting.

<comment><USER26> They might. They have been contributing to WebKit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Anybody got a useful example of reflowable text? On my large screen, a lot the boxes are just empty.

<comment><USER29> I'd suggest resizing the window.

<comment><USER28> I did to see the example work, but my point was that by default this gives a bad UX.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Already seen few sites abusing CSS Regions and making paragraphs harder to read. PLEASE use them wisely.</comment>


Public Health Officials Say Social Justice Matters More Than Social Distance - <AUTHOR> https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/06/04/public-health-protests-301534 <comment><USER2> This same article has already been submitted 3 other times:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23424131](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23424131) [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23430489](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23430489) [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23447148](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23447148)</comment>


When Russian Officials 'Nightmare' Your Business, You Can Lose Everything - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-01-29/when-russian-officials-nightmare-your-business-you-can-lose-everything-even-your-life <comment><USER2> > One spent a year in prison accused of stealing the intellectual property of > leopards by using their skin pattern in the furniture upholstery he made; he > lost $360,000, by his count, including his business.

I was born under communism and this sounds like a joke that we would make about the Soviet system. Does anyone know if there is more to this story?</comment>


Software safety by the numbers - <AUTHOR> http://www.embedded.com/columns/technicalinsights/19201765?printable=true

<comment><USER2>
      "Were there significant changes between the previous version of your kernel and the current maintenance release, or just bug fixes," I asked.
      "Well, we changed the compiler tool chain and added a new feature," the client responded.

So, yes, significant changes.

      "Were the changes reviewed for possible side-effects on other parts of the system?"
      "We tested it before we released it and verified that the bugs were fixed."

So, no, they weren't.

      "Is your testing automated?"
      "No, testing is done with a developer observing the test output."

So, no, it isn't.

      "Do tests that verify bug fixes become part of the regression test suite?"
      "No, we have a list of tests that we run for each release."

So, no, they don't.

      "Does your team use a formal version-control system?"
      "We make a back up before each release."

So, no, they don't.

Let's recap. Significant changes without a good long look at what regression bugs may arise, with only manual testing (it worked on my machine!), and no tests added to an automated suite to ensure that older bugs don't turn up again. No source control, so changes aren't tracked, and they have only a backup of the source code before the last release to track development.

Yikes, though I wouldn't doubt that this is better than the average software development project.</comment>


Google, Facebook don't innovate - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.ft.com/techblog/2010/11/google-facebook-dont-innovate-a-vc/

<comment><USER2> I think Google still innovate in that, as other commenters have noted, they're creating some interesting file system and database solutions. However, these (among others) are infrastructural contributions to the backend. I think the article is talking about innovation from the average consumer's perspective.

I remember speaking to a friend of mine when Google released Wave. He said Wave was the first real home-grown "product" since GMail and it was his opinion that it was developed in Australia because the office there was a kind of skunkworks plant with little bureaucratic oversight compared to the other Google offices around the world (whether this is true, I don't know). He said Google were at the stage where they are big enough for middle management to stifle real innovation because the individual managers don't need to take the kind of risk required with greenlighting a project like Wave (and look how that turned out!).

To Google, buying an early-stage startup is a cost-effective way of outsourcing the risk-taking and that kind of acquisition is the closest they can now get to serious innovation and staying competitive.

<comment><USER3> From the average consumer's perspective, innovation doesn't mean squat. Consumers don't care who invented what, they care about the products and services that are available to them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The Go language, Chrome OS, the recently announced redesign of the backend storage architecture that's supposed to replace MapReduce for some tasks. These are the things that I remember off the top of my head without going through the stuff they keep announcing all the time.

[Edit:] Things like native client and V8 might also be worth mentioning.

<comment><USER5> Apart from these, Google has come up with the WebP image format which may make internet significantly faster than what it is today.

Furthermore Google hosts jquery files on its servers, which for many people is a godsend. While it is a simple thing to implement, it ranks highly on how it benefits websites (and thus the end users of those websites)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> So John Doerr, a venture capitalist, "lost" an impromtu argument at a Web 2.0 Summit and this is supposed to mean that Google and Facebook don't innovate?

This is a really weak submission.

</comment><comment><USER7> Yeah, the whole self-driving car thing was rubbish wasn't it?

<comment><USER8> And also, all the technologies created for distributed computing by google i.e. Mapreduce, GFS, BigTable. Currently most of the web is using Hadoop, HBase, Cassandra and other tools which are all inspired by google work.

<comment><USER9> Really? Those aren't acquisitions?

<comment><USER8> Yeah, they were all developed by Google. I don't think you have any idea about these technologies. Do care to 'google' them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> How about that Chrome, with multi-process tabs + Google Apps, is really a stealth web operating system?

Its surprising that wasn't mentioned...

<comment><USER9> I would prefer to call it an operating environment. Not that different from many others - .Net, the DOM environment of JavaScript, any scripting language in any larger tool.

Lets use "operating system" to mean what its generally understood to mean: something that you boot on hardware, that manages system resources/hosts drivers for devices, manages time and memory.

Just a separation-of-process model is not enough to justify the name Operating System.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Wasn't Google planning (or had in beta?) a voice service before buying Grandcentral? It just seems that when you get to the size of Google, if you see a market that you want to get into and that has an easy to acquire, quality product currently being created, why not buy it? You get the double bonus of a working product and some talent.

Bad day for Doerr. Yikes.

</comment><comment><USER12> Facebook Platform, Graph API, Like Button, Social Applications - a few truly transformative things that have come out of facebook in the past few years. Saying facebook doesn't innovate is rubbish. Though they do tend to borrow an idea here and there, they have sometimes left it better than they found it (exceptions of Quora and 4sq)

</comment><comment><USER13> What about the mobile OS developed by Facebook on all these smartphones?

<comment><USER14> Android was an acquisition.

<comment><USER13> Touché.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_%28operating_system%29#...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_%28operating_system%29#Acquisition_by_Google)</comment></comment></comment>


This Man Wants to Become President, Pass One Law, and Resign - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/view_from_chicago/2015/08/lawrence_lessig_presidential_campaign_donate_before_labor_day_for_citizen.html

<comment><USER2> Lessig's a smart guy and knows that President's don't get to make the laws, they only get to approve them. Making laws is up to the Senate and Congress. One need only look at how hard President Obama has tried "to get laws passed" to see that it isn't a power afforded the Executive office.

The "right" answer is getting two of the three branches on board and that is a hard problem (as it was designed to be) to avoid any one individual (or even a relatively small group) from wielding too much power over the rest of us.

</comment><comment><USER3> Here's Larry recently speaking with Jason at This Week in Startups about his campaign, really fascinating stuff:

[http://thisweekinstartups.com/larry-lessig-referendum- presid...](http://thisweekinstartups.com/larry-lessig-referendum-president/)

</comment><comment><USER4> Extensive prior discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10041651](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10041651)</comment>


Who controls glibc? - <AUTHOR> https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/753646/f8dc1b00d53e76d8/ <comment><USER2> Comments moved to [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17015644](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17015644), since both threads have comments and that one was posted a few hours earlier.

We'll roll back the clock on it so the submission rank doesn't suffer.</comment>


Show HN: My first web application - SuggestMeLearn - <AUTHOR>

- After starting and quitting so many times, I finally decided to start small project and created SuggetMeLearn
- This is my first ever attempt to a complete web application - The idea is to
	- let people suggest the way they learnt a particular language or technology 	- let people seeking to learn decide based on the suggestion to pick resources and start learning rather than browsing through infinite search results. 	- people can vote if they think they also believe that a particular suggestion is a great resource(and suggestions are sorted by votes)<p>- All suggestions are welcome. - URL : http://suggestmelearn.appspot.com/ <comment><USER2> Different people can have different images in their mind what does constitute "language learning". For this reason I suggest to encourage people to leave more details about their recommendations made. Minor thing - what is the reason behind the order of the languages presented? It could be useful to sort the languages by the number of suggestions made.

<comment><AUTHOR> No Ordering is maintained, I would change to show them in order, thank you for pointing this one out!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I like the idea. The use of Bootstrap is a good idea.

One suggestion for feedback would be to seed some of the subjects with your own suggestions. Looks fine in Firefox to me.

</comment><comment><USER4> Looks like a little of the Topic line on each language page is cut off by your header. I'm running Chrome on Mac OS X.

<comment><USER5> same here.

Good idea, a little smoothing around the edges and it can go far.</comment></comment>


How a Math Genius Hacked OkCupid to Find True Love - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2014/01/how-to-hack-okcupid/2/

<comment><USER2> Previous discussion: [http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7099855](http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7099855) (372 points, 17 hours ago, 170 comments)

<comment><AUTHOR> I hate it when that happens. I wonder why my submission didn't get rolled up into the previous thread as a vote? Sorry about that everybody.

<comment><USER2> This is a link to page #2.</comment></comment></comment>


Contempt Culture - <AUTHOR> http://blog.aurynn.com/contempt-culture-2 <comment><USER2> I guess I never understood the elitism and strong feelings around programming languages. It's such a strange thing to stake one's _identity_ to.

It's like getting upset that Dostoyevsky wrote _Crime and Punishment_ in Russian. The language is irrelevant - he got his point across regardless. Would the novel be any less important and valuable if it was written in German, or Portuguese, Latin, or Mandarin? Of course not.

<comment><USER3> There are valid reasons to not like a language, PHP being the easiest to pick on: [https://eev.ee/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad- design/](https://eev.ee/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-design/)

As for the people using the language, I have inherited a few PHP projects, and without exception, they are a mess. The code quality and readability is usually garbage, simple stuff like tabbing and consistent variable names. SQL Injection vulnerabilities, and XSS issues abound.

<comment><USER4> This is exactly the attitude that the author is taking issue with.

Many inexperienced developers use PHP and make a mess. But try to remember that there are also many brilliant engineers at Facebook and other companies using PHP and doing amazing things with it.

<comment><USER3> By valid reasons, I mean other than the developers, read the link in my post.

You may also appreciate this viewpoint: [https://blog.codinghorror.com/php- sucks-but-it-doesnt-matter...](https://blog.codinghorror.com/php-sucks-but-it- doesnt-matter/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is really important. Even if you think that PHP is the worst thing humankind has ever inflicted upon itself, you are not making the world a better place by denigrating the work done in it with this spirit of contempt. If it is terrible, then speak positively about what can be done. If it is painful, then speak positively about how projects / devs can migrate. There are things within tech that deserve to be spoken about negatively, including within language design and software engineering practices, but when everything devolves into tribal signifying you are _not making anything better._</comment>


Try the unconventional alternative - <AUTHOR> http://blog.businessofsoftware.org/2011/08/an-unconventional-alternative.html

<comment><USER2> Two very good business stories on unconventional thinking, both forced by a lack of proper preparation and due diligence.

It doesn't distract from the OP's point - don't restrict yourself to only the obvious options you have in front of you - but at the same time, think about how much opportunity could have been created by applying to innovation the thought that went into fixing two million-dollar mistakes.

</comment><comment><USER3> Great story and a good example of why having the right team is critical.

Creative problem solving is a difficult thing to cultivate since it requires both insight (e.g the ePrize legal guy) and also the courage to _actually_ voice it. Many environments do a great job of inadvertently crushing the latter.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> This is one of the most unexpected, but welcome, reactions to anything I have put on Hacker News. Thank you wonderful HN people.

</comment><comment><USER4> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gordian_knot>

</comment><comment><USER5> How is the Brazilian embassy 'within the geographic borders of Australia'? That piece of land is part of Brazil (full stop), and for this reason (embassies) all countries are multiply-connected regions.

Edit: To be precise, their largest regions (excluding their own embassies) are multiply connected.

<comment><USER6> That's pretty much a courtesy, no?

<comment><USER7> If someone commits a crime in the embassy, they should be tried according to the laws of the nation of the embassy. Also, an attack on an embassy is technically an invasion of the land of that nation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Good story. Wouldn't a better hack have been to draw input values in both countries, then communicate this input to the other location and XOR the results to determine the final outcome, so the drawing will actually have happened in both territories? This would also scale to n>2 countries.

<comment><USER9> Laws do not work that way!

[You don't get to use a Morbo reference every day on Hacker News.]

<comment><USER8> i did go to law school and am thus reasonably well aware of how laws work ;)

having no specific knowledge about sweepstakes regulations, i does not appear completely unreasonable to me that a random drawing in each territory completely changing the outcome might satisfy the requirements.

as a practical matter, when $1m in extra payouts are at stake it could be reasonable to accept a fine from regulators while at the same time avoiding civil liability to participants.</comment></comment></comment>


Olympics 2012 security: welcome to lockdown London - <AUTHOR> http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/2012/mar/12/london-olympics-security-lockdown-london

<comment><USER2> It's not just about more police. This paragraph caught the scale of things for me:

During the Games an aircraft carrier will dock on the Thames. Surface-to-air missile systems will scan the skies. Unmanned drones, thankfully without lethal missiles, will loiter above the gleaming stadiums and opening and closing ceremonies. RAF Typhoon Eurofighters will fly from RAF Northolt. A thousand armed US diplomatic and FBI agents and 55 dog teams will patrol an Olympic zone partitioned off from the wider city by an 11-mile, £80m, 5,000-volt electric fence.</comment>


Let's help Airbnb rebuild the bridge it just burned - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/doc/2013/05/28/lets-help-airbnb-rebuild-the-bridge-it-just-burned/ <comment><USER2> Interesting to read about the story behind this. I recently tried to use Airbnb to get a last minute spot in Boston. The most annoying part of the ID process was that it acted like everything was cool, let me browse the site, let me make a reservation and put in my credit card info, and only _then_ told me to give them tons of extra info before they would process the reservation.

I actually tried to go through their process and it was quite draconian. They ask for tons of stuff. Last 4 of SSN was one part, and they also asked questions about streets I lived on years ago, specifically, which county those streets are in. They must have a contract with someone who has a database of this kind of stuff.

But I got through that and was hung up on the last step, "Online ID", which requires a Facebook account (don't use it under my real last name), LinkedIn account (don't have one), or recording an introduction video (not possible while I'm sitting in a busy coffeeshop, also seemed like a pretty absurd ask). At this point I wanted to bail out but there was no "Cancel Reservation" button anywhere and they had my CC info hostage. So I had to close my whole account.

By the way, this was an account I had previously used to book an Airbnb place with no problems, and got a positive review from the guy. The surprise ID requirements struck me as manipulative, as if they knew if they'd asked for all this stuff _before_ I booked a night, I wouldn't have used their site. So they pretended they were going to hook me up with a room, then sprung this out of nowhere.

<comment><USER3> The "creepy questions" are a pretty standard identity verification scheme. If you ever open a bank or brokerage account online, you'll probably be asked these. They're used because they're simple and work reasonably well. Anyone can steal or guess the last four digits of your SSN or driver's license, but it's harder to learn random details of your life.

(Then again, I recently answered the creepy questions for a friend of mine, so it's not protection against someone you know stealing your identity.)

I don't know why Airbnb needs to know your identity, but I could come up with some reasons. Imagine someone signs up under your name as a host, and their first guests have their laptops stolen. _Your_ name is going to appear on that police report, and that's a pain for you. If the whole fake identity scam can be nipped in the bud, though, this won't happen as often, making life easier for more than just Airbnb's users. I don't think that's a terrible thing.

In a business where you're having total strangers stay in your house, is it really an invasion of privacy to ask you to verify you are who you say you are? This isn't an online blogging service or something, after all.

<comment><USER4> The "creepy questions" -- in the USA at least -- are just another revenue stream for the three credit reporting agencies. They (or third party companies paying them for the data) pull data from your credit report and then ask multiple-choice questions based on the data. It's absurdly insecure given the large number of people who have subscription access to credit reports (landlords, car dealerships, employers, etc.). Even more ridiculous is that the questions are based on data that is often false. A scammer who applies for a credit card in your name provides a false address; that false address is added to your credit report and now can become part of the identity verification scheme. And of course the onus is on _you_ to fix the bad data held by these companies.

<comment><USER5> I recently failed such an authentication. The system had bad data about someone they thought was my relative even though I have no relative by that name. I was asked three different questions about this "relative" and on all three said I dont know anyone by that name. In the end the agent administering the test told me I had failed the self identification. I was eventually able to talk her into putting in a manual override but the whole experience was disconcerting.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Airbnb's concept, however wonderful it may be when it does work, is full of practical and legal holes which are now beginning to emerge.

The big question is: can Airbnb close those holes without significantly reducing the usefulness of their service?

I very much doubt that. Hospitality is an industry with a long history, lots of regulation and self-regulation (which is _not_ just corrupt government protecting incumbents), and disrupting that means tackling a huge range of issues an liabilities which Airbnb heavily oversimplifies.

I expect an increase in regulatory intervention, horror-stories in the media, lawsuits and Airbnb becoming increasingly more bureaucratic and complex in an effort to handle that.

<comment><USER6> I wonder what part of this comment was a reason to slowban me?

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I love the usual weaselly worded "We apologize if our changes caused you distress" automated response to her second email.

That kind of corporate lingo is what I expect from soulless corporations.

[EDIT]

To make it clear. She offered lots of suggestions on what other services they could use and instead of a personal "Thanks for that, we will investigate" they gave her the brush-off with an obviously automated email.

Pretty shoddy customer relations.

<comment><USER8> Wasn't Airbnb the company where the founders took a special dividend using funds from one of the later VC rounds (which Ron Conway publicly objected to)?

That sounds like something leaders of soulless corporations would do.

<comment><USER9> No, it was Chamath who called them out (They later reconciled). [http://allthingsd.com/20111001/vcs-unite-chamath- palihapitiy...](http://allthingsd.com/20111001/vcs-unite-chamath-palihapitiya- decries-airbnbs-recent-112m-funding-for-excessive-founder-control-and-cashout- in-email/) and [http://allthingsd.com/20111002/airbnb-investor-chamath- palih...](http://allthingsd.com/20111002/airbnb-investor-chamath-palihapitiya- settle-differences-with-employees-to-get-liquidity/)

<comment><USER8> Thx for the correction :)

Did not know that they arranged to give employees liquidity after the initial news.

 _> Brian and I have spoken at length and based on our discussions, I've learned some new items that have proven to me that everyone is paying serious and thoughtful attention to the needs of all shareholders including employees. Specifically, the company has developed a strategy about their next financing round where all employees who have been with the company for some length of time will participate in a structured liquidity program. While the details haven't been finalized, I know Brian and completely trust that he will execute on his commitment._

[http://allthingsd.com/20111002/airbnb-investor-chamath- palih...](http://allthingsd.com/20111002/airbnb-investor-chamath-palihapitiya- settle-differences-with-employees-to-get-liquidity/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> 1) Why should we help a company valued at over $1 billion dig itself out of a hole of its own making?

2) The primary complaint is that Verified ID reduces the number of bookings. This is only a concern to people who are using AirBnB illegally-i.e., as an unregistered hotel--and thus depend on volume. The people using AirBnB for its proper purpose--occasional temporary "guests"--are largely unaffected by this.

<comment><USER11> I like the tone of Doc's post. Very positive and solution focused.

As for #2, it remains to be seen I guess how much % drop in AirBNB bookings are caused by this. It will be some number, but obviously I think they're prepared for it. I don't think this has anything to do with "unregistered hotels".

<comment><USER12> I like the tone of Doc's post as well, however, as a consumer, I don't think it's my problem to help a company out if they suck at serving their customer.....and if I don my entrepreneurial hat, the more AirBNB annoy people, the bigger the opportunity for a good competitor to pick up the pieces.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> > _As a host, it is up to me to choose who I allow in my home. I like that I > can decide how many requirements to place on my guests. Should I choose to > place strict requirements, I get more protection and probably fewer > bookings. I like having the choice. Airbnb just took the choice away from me > and I'm not happy about it._

Before we get into arguments about the validity of libertarianism...I think it shouldn't be shocking that when a company becomes large (with more at stake), they have to act in ways that will be overbearing in comparison to what they were before.

The quoted complaint above could easily apply to, let's say, the Apple iOS store, in which decisions are made _heavily_ in favor of playing it safe and clean. I would like to argue that I'm wise enough to make my own choices about downloading immoral/unpleasant apps...and I'm entitled to make that argument. However, I can't argue that this...ahem, proactive policy prevents a great many shit-fests that might otherwise arise were it not in place. And I really can't dispute that Apple so far been wildly successful in the app marketplace.

Likewise, from Airbnb's perspective, I can see why they've made the calculation that proactively _preventing_ scammers is overall, a good business decision. Because a few disasters from slightly foolish customers is enough to doom the entire ship.

<comment><USER14> How exactly does a LinkedIn or Facebook profile, much less a personal video, prevent scammers? All three of those are trivial to fake. On the other hand a public feedback system with persistent identities, _which they already have_ is harder to game.

No, this is a ham fisted marketing initiative pretending to be about security. Why they didn't just buy 'likes' with coupons like every other scummy company out there, I don't know.

<comment><USER15> It's actually not super easy to fake a Facebook or LinkedIn presence. Most services that use social media presence as an identity check ask questions like:

1\. How long has your account been active?

2\. Does your account have a human-like pattern of activity?

3\. Do your social graphs overlap realistically? Are you Facebook friends with your LinkedIn connections?

Etc. It'd take an extremely patient scammer to fake that sort of data. It can be done, of course, it's not trivial.

<comment><USER16> My "Social Graph" between Facebook and LinkedIn is approximately 2. One is for social networking, the other for professional. So if they think there's any good to come from comparing the two, there's going to be a lot of people like me for whom it Just Doesn't Work.

<comment><USER17> More likely, there will be _a few_ people like you for whom it Just Doesn't Work. Which is fine, as a company you need to decide on which customers you want to take on, and outliers generally aren't worth the trouble (nothing personal).

<comment><USER18> No, I think "a lot" is more accurate. I have only 3 crossovers. I do not FB friend my coworkers, and I do not LinkedIn random FB friends. One is social, one is professional, and I think quite a few people use it that way. Not all of us consume social networking like a buffet.

<comment><USER17> OK sorry if this reply sounds like I'm nerdraging, it's because I am - don't take it personal, it happens so often here nowadays that sometimes I can't hold it back any more.

Can we please please please stop with the 'anecdote of 1 = data' and 'I do it like this and so do my friends (who are self-selected to be as much like me as possible)' arguments. _It does not matter_ what _you_ do, nor does it matter what you _think_. Businesses have much more data on this than the vast majority of HN readers, and while it's nice to think that they're all stupid in the 'I am so much smarter' sense, it is most likely not true. If Airbnb had, over the course of testing their validation approach against the first let's say 1000 users found out that the majority had little to no overlap in their social graphs between social networks, do you think they would keep using it this way? Clearly the answer is no, which leads to the prima facie conclusion that your generalization of your own behavior to the population at large is flat-out wrong. I'm not saying there is no way it could be that indeed most people have little overlap, just that the evidence we have so far, plus some reasonable thinking, points to the other conclusion.

Of course, if you do have (or can point to) _data_ (i.e., not anecdotes, not 'I think', but hard data, obtained in a methodologically sound way) to the contrary, that would be a valuable addition to this discussion. All these "I don't do it like that so it sucks!" replies are just noise, and that was (in a passive-aggressive way) one of the underlying points in my reply.

<comment><USER19> Your argument is based on tenuous reasoning predicated on the assumption that you know how the Airbnb people are thinking and how they intend to use the data. The other argument is based on the assumption that there are probably other people who use Facebook and LinkedIn in a similar fashion (I am another data point). I do not see how your argument carries any more weight than theirs. It certainly fails the hard evidence test you put forth.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> In the middle of a recent trip, AirBnB asked me for more verification info to make a new reservation -- credit-report-based questions -- even though I'd already...

(1) been a well-reviewed AirBnB guest on multiple occasions;

(2) concluded transactions through them on more than one CC for those previous stays;

(3) linked my Facebook and LinkedIn profiles long ago.

Such verification questions can involve things like car loans from more than a decade ago, and on at least one of the questions I wasn't even sure I remembered the right answer.

Though I understand they have fraud concerns, I felt it kind of obnoxious to spring this new requirement on me in the middle of a trip, when I was depending on AirBnB working the same as before (and indeed as it had worked on my 1st AirBnB reservation of the same trip).

Had I been required to send a scan of some government ID, I'd have felt even more like they'd breached our prior understanding, without warning, at an inconvenient time.

</comment><comment><USER21> Requiring users to record an "introduction video" is beyond parody; next step is probably to provide a front-and-back naked picture of yourself holding today's newspaper.

And you thought DHS was bad! And you thought "regulations" were bad! Let's get rid of it all! Let's _disrupt_!

But now, Facebook decides to police _jokes_ according to vague claims by special-interest groups [1] and AirBnB requires its users to do a little dance for them before they can use their services.

Democracy has a lot of flaws, but constitutional rights and democratically voted laws, and a functioning judicial system, and well-run government agencies (I know, I know) are several orders of magnitude preferable to petty policies that grow in the mind of the average "community manager".

[1] [https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook- safety/controversial...](https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook- safety/controversial-harmful-and-hateful-speech-on-facebook/574430655911054)

</comment><comment><USER22> I am building a trust platform for p2p marketplaces (<https://www.credport.org>) and while there have been many great points mentioned in this thread, I'd like to chime in as well.

In general, most of the critics seem to say one of the two:

1\. I'm obviously trustworthy, just look at me.

2\. I want to have choice, I want to decide whether to host someone unverified or not.

What people need to realize about trust in p2p marketplaces is that trust is irrelevant, it's the experience that matters. At the end of the day, it matters whether you get what you wanted, and if you didn't, well fuck, it must be Airbnb's fault. It's never the users fault. Think about it.

On eBay, people get scammed every day. Does anyone say "well, that's just the users fault"? No, everyone says "eBay is full of scammers, I will never do it again". Same with the AppStores/Software Downloads. It's mostly the user's fault for downloading malicious software, but the platform always gets blamed.

So what you do in this case, and what Airbnb is doing is to "clean" the platform, cause the last thing you want is to have another Methlab incident or become the next eBay

</comment><comment> guard-of-terra Airbnb is an inherently international business and there is no way this is going to work for around the globe customers.

In many countries people don't use facebook. Linkedin is a joke anyway. Where they do they're not used to authing with it. Where they don't you may use local social networks but they're often anonymous or don't provide api as rich. There is also this huge problem with languages: how are you going to read korean id in hangeul? how are you going to link airbnb name in latin with social network name in cyrillic? do you seriously expect people to be able to record videos in english that can't then be used to ridicule that people (they're going to be public, right?)

In many cultures people are just averse of posting private information about them on the web.

<comment><USER23>
      In many countries people don't use facebook

In my country people use Facebook just fine.

It's just that after Facebook more and more turned up the creepy volume to - for me - intolerable levels I chose to "delete" my Facebook account and don't plan to re-activate it ever again.

If your business relies on me having a Facebook account (or a specific piece of hardware) then I guess I'm not in the range of your targeted customers and we will never, ever do business together.

If you offer an (even more inconvenient) alternative I'm probably fine with that. For example: If your mobile boarding pass doesn't work with my device and I have to print it at an airport kiosk I'm fine with that. If I _must_ have an iPhone to fly with your airline then I guess it's just not meant that we do business together.

<comment> guard-of-terra That too. I've seen people annouce proudly they've left facebook, exactly the audience AirBnB wishes to serve.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Generally, I feel people are too cynical. And writing-off the Facebook and LinkedIn integration as merely a ploy for access to your social graph at first made my eyes roll.

But the truth is, there are a lot of things we do online that require real, meaningful identity verification. You put your SSN and DOB in and the computer gives you a series of multiple-choice questions from items on your credit report. People are used to them. They work.

And at the least, why not offer the credit report ID verification as the backup, perhaps alongside this video? Seems to me it would really cover their bases: The free spirits who would sooner die than submit to a credit check can produce a video. The professional, 2-million-miler, harvard-law types wouldn't flinch at an identity check that they've done every time they opened a credit card or bank account or many investment accounts or used the US Treasury or IRS systems or a credit monitoring product or, the list goes on. There's just a nominal cost associated with these, and unlike applications for credit they do not impact a persons credit score.

I'm not sold, but _maybe_ there's something to the reliance on Facebook and LinkedIn afterall?

<comment><USER25> I have neither. What am I supposed to do?

<comment><USER26> Don't use a service that requires you to have one? Or make an account with one of them so you can use a service that requires you to have one? Seems pretty straightforward.

<comment> guard-of-terra 1) seems straightforward along with making them a bad name every time it comes to discussion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Ah my friends, this is what happens when you reach scale. It means you have to protect against every little black swan that comes along (mainly for PR reasons) which overburdens the rest of the white swans.

This reminds me of all of the companies trying to compete against PayPal, who tell themselves and customers that "We'll do it better this time I swear!". I can't wait until they try to reach the size of PayPal and realize their whole business model is based solely on fraud prevention. Something not easily, dare I say possibly, solved by any algorithm.

This is also why I like 37Signals, since they let their customers outgrow their software. For every project manager that says "ugh basecamp doesnt do this, I need something else", 37Signals quietly says "see ya later, you'll be back in a year!"

</comment><comment><USER28> Seems to me the bigger issue here is HOW they implemented this, not WHY they implemented it.

Yes, some people are asking that they personally be allowed to take the risk of hosting unverified people. As AirBNB continues to grow, I understand and agree why they won't let you do it - more cases of drug parties or robberies could ruin their business, and your business isn't worth as much to them as their business.

But requiring (if I understand it correctly) one of Facebook, LinkedIn, or a video? Telling you this ~80% of the way through a booking process? Implementing it with no notification (so people currently on holidays suddenly bump into the requirements)? These are the bigger issue.

I doubt they will cancel the current implementation plan in order to rethink a new one. But improving upon it - in particular with additional ways to verify identity - seems important.

</comment><comment><USER29> No matter what you do, there's always going to be complaints. Verified ID is a seriously good idea. I would definitely feel safer hosting verified people. Of course, they might still be horrible guests, but that will be their last visit with any AirBnb host.

<comment><USER30> Good on ya. But it should be an option, not forced. If you only want to host people with "Verified ID", then just reject anybody who doesn't have it.

<comment><USER31> If I read the article correctly, hosts are still in control as to whether they will allow all guests or just verified. Did I misinterpret this?

Is the uproar over the mandate that a random 25% of users are now required to go through verification?

<comment><USER32> 25% is really high and might as well be mandatory. Only a fool would count on not having to verify, especially when they don't tell you until the last second. This isn't a pilot program, this is a massive, invasive change.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Wow, I was planning to use them for the first time for a vacation in a few weeks. No way in hell they're getting my business now. Way more invasive than a hotel.

A video? Who seriously thought that this was a good idea?

<comment><USER34> Hotels unilaterally ask for ID and a credit card these days.

<comment><USER21> Some (ok, maybe most) hotels ask for an ID when you check in.

But I've never been to a hotel that asked for an ID _just to make a reservation_. I use booking.com, which is perfect BTW, and they never asked for an ID.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> "Quit trying to mine data under the guise of trust." A commenter to the original AirBnB announcement.

So true and happens all the time.

</comment><comment><USER36> Sounds like the process Paypal have been using for a while. I recall having to send a scan of my passport, drivers licence and Visa card to them a while back to prove I am not a money launderer and using the service for legitimate purposes. While intrusive I am more inclined to trust Paypal than Airbnb for a couple of reasons. One of those being Paypal have been around longer, they've established a rapport and two, I either comply or lose any funds I have in my Paypal account and make it hard for others to send me money in the future.

These kinds of processes scare me mostly from a safety point of view, but also from a trust point of view. How do I know the person verifying my credentials on the other end isn't secretly funnelling my documentation off to a nefarious third party using it to get a loan in my name or steal my identity to commit a crime? This has trouble written all over it, surely there is another way? The step requiring LinkedIn or Facebook is just ridiculous, what if you don't use any of those services?

If a company like Airbnb wants to dig themselves a hole, why should it be up to us to help them get out of it? I won't be using the service any more because of these changes and I assume others won't either.

<comment><USER37> One person in that post said it right: "You want people to send you their photo ID / passport? Are you out of your *&#%& mind?"

I am not even sure if I am legally ALLOWED to send a copy of my ID anywhere in my country.

The right answer to a request from a company asking for such information is "F.U., no".

<comment><USER38> In Germany, you are not allowed to copy your personal ID document.

<comment><USER39> That's an interesting claim, what do you mean?

<comment><USER38> You are not allowed to make a photocopy of the personal ID document. It contains data about your electronic signature.

<comment><USER39> I really meant 'who says so?' It sounds like an unusual restriction, and when I tried googling it I couldn't find any mention of this.

<comment><USER38> Its in Section 14 of the relevant law:

<http://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/pauswg/__14.html>

(in German, obviously)

It says who is allowed to 'process' the relevant information from the document. Copying is not mentioned.

The German Wikipedia has a section on it: [http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personalausweis_(Deutschland)#K...](http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personalausweis_\(Deutschland\)#Kopiereinschr.C3.A4nkungen)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> My question: What exactly is AirB&B trying to solve for here? Is it safety for the host? Legal requirements? Payment fraud and chargebacks?

As mentioned in the article, it feels like increased verification requirements should be an option available to to the host rather than a universal requirement.

One important lesson learned: no one wants to record a brief video as a step of any verification process.

<comment><USER41> Agreed the video is somewhat ridiculous. It could be a supply/demand tilt (more demand than supply: weed out the crappy demand). It could also be a long term move. If they're able to have all verified people in the network, they'll have basically the most powerful local network ever created.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> I objected when a roommate wanted to rent out our living room on Airbnb. I realize that the probability is extremely low that we'd end up with a deranged lunatic in our house. But for me, that tiny possibility (and more so the irrational stress that accompanies it) far outweighs the benefit making a few extra bucks on the side.

So would I reconsider using Airbnb now that they have Verified IDs? Probably not. The root of the issue is that I don't want strangers in my house while I'm asleep. Even if Airbnb has their info on file, they're still strangers to me.

This move likely alienates many of their core users, while offering no appeal to non-users like me. Perhaps there is another segment this appeals to -- users who are concerned about the possibility of petty crime, and who feel this would be a deterrent or would aid with legal recourse?

</comment><comment><USER43> > Banks lose customer data all the time and they have some of the most > stringent standards possible

Tell that to my maximum 6 digit, no special characters bank web login pin.

</comment><comment><USER44> Am I the only person who thinks all of these people are overreacting?

<comment> guard-of-terra How so? I genuinely don't have facebook or linkedin, I genuinely don't want to record a video (in english lol wtf?) with my personal details and I'll genuinely not use them ever if they start doing that to international customers.

They think they're unique but their business model is trivial to reproduce once they have alienated half of their audience.

<comment><USER44> Why are you so opposed to having your identify verified so that hosts know you're not a scammer? You couldn't give them even a library card with your photo on it or something? The ease-of-use of Airbnb is what makes everyone like it... I don't think that's super easy to replicate. I also don't think a quick ID check dramatically reduces the ease-of-use.

<comment> guard-of-terra They don't just want an ID, what they want is an account on some intrusive social network.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> Wow... what on earth are they thinking? And what on earth are some people who have commented thinking, to support this?

I go to hotels, hostels, couch-surf, etc; I know people who rent properties with varying degrees of seriousness and involvement, and couch-surfing hosts. I interact with people who do these things on every continent. Airbnb is ridiculously out of line; it's requiring more than authoritarian governments do, much less any of its competition.

</comment><comment><USER46> It's already a common practice in Russia to ask for ID during check-in. Why not ask all hosts to do it, it will have less friction for guests.

Lately, my Russian friend was trying to do a last minute reservation via Airbnb and they asked for verification. Russian users do not have facebook, they use vk.com, and instead of linkedin they have moikrug.ru. So she had to use a local alternative (sutochno.ru). Lost money for Airbnb.

</comment><comment><USER47> I'm just waiting for the first AirBnB user that declines to leave the rental property. Eviction in some places is a really hard and long process.

</comment><comment><USER48> What I don't get is how is a video supposed to verify anything? Why did they pick loyal customers to do the verification? It would be more comprehensible if they required it from new customers. And lastly, why don't they use a real id confirmation service. Where I live we can go to the local post office, show some ID and that's it. No sending personal data anywhere.

</comment><comment><USER49> I think AirBnB has every right to ask its users to verify their identity in some way. It just so happens, the methods they chose were maybe not the best options for their UX.

I mean, I don't see how you can go half way on this. Leaving the choice up to the host doesn't protect anyone. It's easy to say "hey, I don't want to bother with this.", but the minute something DOES go wrong, who are they going to blame? AirBnB.

They have to cover their ass, simple as that. It sucks, but we live in a litigious society that loves to transfer blame.

If you were in a position where you had to make a tough choice and disappoint some people to protect your family(or company), you'd do it too.

As far as data mining goes... what's new? Are there any massive scale online businesses that aren't looking for new ways to mine their users for marketing and business data? I don't like it either, but I can't say I didn't expect it.

</comment><comment><USER50> Deja vu when reading the Airbnb reply. Did they really repeat a paragraph, or is that an error in the blog post?

</comment><comment><USER51> A big concern of mine is that this verification process does not seem inclusive to transgender people. Obviously the official documentation of these people would not necessarily match their online profiles , or in case of video their appearance. Thoughts?

<comment><USER52> No one really cares about transgender people. They make up such a small percentage of the population that they're not worth worrying about. In nearly all cases they are forced into the existing system/structure, unless legally required otherwise.

<comment><USER51> Do you think that this is right or wrong? I think that it is wrong. Also the assumption that they make such a small percentage is wrong.

<comment><USER44> I don't think it's right or wrong (on the part of Airbnb, maybe wrong on the part of society as a whole -- there are federal laws for handicap/accessibility problems but not yet for self-identity not matching government issued identity)

The issue is that transgender people make up (I'm guessing and feel free to correct me if I'm wrong) < 5% of the general population. I would then assume that < 1% of the Airbnb population is transgender. That's a low enough number that it is more efficient for Airbnb to solve for those issues on a case by case basis rather than in code / process changes. Simple case of optimizing for the 90% instead of the 100% -- if that's offensive then I apologize but in my opinion it's justified in the near-term (maybe not in the long-term)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> Hey everyone, I'm one of the engineers who worked on Verified ID. I'm going to keep reading all the comments people leave, but rather than respond to all of them on here, I've written up some of my thoughts on our blog: <http://nerds.airbnb.com/verified-id/>

I'd just like to stress that this doesn't address all the issues brought up, since some of them require more time, but I'm happy to answer more questions if you leave a comment on my post.

</comment><comment><USER54> I think i was an involuntary early adopter of this process, my experience was that the ID upload kept failing and then broke the connection to my linkedin and facebook accounts. Support wasn't able to help, beyond suggesting I make a video.

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5710284>

</comment><comment><USER55> Inevitable as a company get bigger it likes bureaucracy more and wants to cover its ass over being sued for bad experiences.

We all hate Paypal for its overofficcious moneylaundering ID requests which, should its dBs be compromised could easily screw the finances of millions. Do we really want to give these people IDs?

<comment><USER56> The difference there is that Paypal is required by law to make those ID requests. AirBNB is not.

<comment><USER55> Oh quite right! This is why I'm entirely against this, whereas I just deeply hate Paypal's lack of customer service.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> Wow, this could be interesting. Scaling this across the world, reliably verifying anybody in the world, seems like an extremely hard problem, especially with the restraint that people can't just walk away.

</comment><comment><USER58> Anyone else surprised at the fact that this poor UX is happening at a company and founding team that pride themselves in their design roots? Wtf.

</comment><comment><USER59> I don't know much personally about airbnb.

I wonder how many bad incidents airbnb has facilitated? Searching for "airbnb robberies" seems to point to only one incident (San Francisco) where the victim blogged about it.

But generally we shouldn't expect to hear about crimes facilitated by airbnb. Neither the cops nor the victims have an incentive to publicize it.

airbnb may have paid out a lot in hush money and settlements.

So, while this new identity scheme is unwelcome and intrusive, it may be the only way forward for airbnb.

</comment><comment><USER60> Bankruptcy is normal in a free market. Let's let Airbnb disappear and make room for better companies.</comment>